There are a number of reports that are unidentified and in fact cannot be identified as anything, yet they exist just the same. Jeff Challender found many of them on teh space shuttle missions as well.

I'm glad you posted that video. I saw it a while ago and couldn't find it.
Before seeing it, I always wondered why shuttle night images are crappy.
It does seem deliberate to me.

May Jim Oberg will chime in with a comment. I am interested to know if there is a legitimate reason for the poor quality of the transmissions!

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.
This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

May Jim Oberg will chime in with a comment. I am interested to know if there is a legitimate reason for the poor quality of the transmissions!

The technical specs of the cameras used are included in the console operations handbook, which i scanned and linked to on my home page.

The cameras seemed to us to work fine for their purpose, which was to monitor activity in and around the payload bay. They were also used as navigation sensors during maneuvers with other satellites. They had reasonable low light snsitivity, especially when the AGC shifted to maximum gain.

Then in the 1990s they got assigned to Skeet Vaughan's lightning sprite search, and were specifcally aimed, whenever possible, toward the receding horizon on night passes. That's where most of the youtube space UFO videos came from.

It's very hard to get any discussion going about Jeff Challender since he had so many good UFO pictures from the shuttle missions that no one has ever been able to identify.

Well, I admit that Jeff was never able to identify any of them, but when I bought and watched his video about eight years ago, it all looked like ordinary stuff to me -- shuttle dandruff, structural and window relfections, common occurrences.

Jeff got a lot of pleasure from watching the videos and imagining he was onto some deep dark secret. Considering his health situation it was a pleasure nobody really wanted to deny him. But he never really understood anything about normal space flight technology, orbital motion, communications, etc. Good example: his passion for believing the space-to-Earth communications 'Zone of Exclusion' was a reserved region of top secret communications about UFOs.

It's hard enough when people just don't know the basic facts about some environment, such as spaceflight. It's even harder when they THINK they DO 'know' so many erroneous things about it. Jeff was a good example, but others have posted on this thread recently -- folks who made guesses or suppositions or imaginations of what OUGHT to be true about unearthly conditions in space, that lead them logically in false directions.

Bestg example -- the very specific illumination conditions under which the most notorious of the 'shuttle UFO' videos occurred, just past sunrise with camera looking back towards still-dark Earth horizon. This creates the BEST conditions for small drifting nearby objects to be brightly visible, to become visiible as they drift out of shuttle shadow ['materialize'], and to be caught up in effluent flows from thrusters, water/gas dumps, flash evaporator activation, and other normal processes.

The amazing 'coincidence' of this timing feature of the videos was never noticed -- or if noticed, not understood -- by the UFO world. They didn't care about the basics such as illumination conditions, and withheld such data if they had it.

The results of this enforced ignorance and misinformation are easy to see -- enthusiasm for interpretations of the videos that are inaccurate.

Without grappling with this primary source of misinterpretation, any serious study of really interesting potential sightings is stillborne.

-- the very specific illumination conditions under which the most notorious of the 'shuttle UFO' videos occurred, just past sunrise with camera looking back towards still-dark Earth horizon. This creates the BEST conditions for small drifting nearby objects to be brightly visible, to become visiible as they drift out of shuttle shadow ['materialize'], and to be caught up in effluent flows from thrusters, water/gas dumps, flash evaporator activation, and other normal processes.

I have to admit that being a believer in the ETH, there were a few (not many) of the shuttle nightime videos which I felt in the past MAY have been caused by extraterrestrial intelligence. That is, they reinforced my leaning towards the ETH.
However, the fact that you pointed out the circumstances in which many of these video were shot, I have reviewed many them with a more skeptical mind.
lol...Damn you! I feel like a 5 year old kid and you have told me Santa is a huge lie!

Sorry to disappoint firm believers, I have to stand by my conviction that credit earned is credit due.
If the truth is to be determined wrt the ETH, then the only progress we can make is with a mutual understanding of the viewpoints of both "believers" and "skeptics"
The truth is likely to be found within the gray zone of common ground somewhere between each polarity.

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.
This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

The truth is likely to be found within the gray zone of common ground somewhere between each polarity.

That's the best place to look for it, and i've found enough stuff of genuine interest --
not THE prize, perhaps, but many more-than-merely-consolation prizes, to keep looking.

And for spaceflight, always keeping eyes peeled for the unusual is one method of minimizing risk.

There has been at least one case where NOT seeing a 'UFO' may have led to fatal consequences --
Columbia, in 2003. The broke-off piece of the wing leading edge SHOULD have been naked-eye
and/or camera detectable as it drifted away, but nobody was looking. Seeing it in time COULD have
opened opportunites for rescue or repair -- but we never got the chance to even TRY.

Besides, stands to reason, one of the best opportunities to detect traces of another spacefaring civilization would be what we come across on our own spacefaring. Always be prepared to be astonished.